Introduction
As a coach, consultant or service business, having a website is crucial to establishing your online presence and promoting your brand.
However, with so many website platforms available, it can be challenging to know which one is the best fit for your coaching business needs.
So many businesses rush into investing in a website or funnel platform without fully understanding WHAT sort of website they need.
In this blog, I’ll deep-dive into three of the most popular website platforms available on the market, ideal for small service-based businesses.
To figure out which works platform works best for your coaching business and to help you take back control of your website and your content, let’s dive in.
Your website is the hub of your online presence
A website is one of the most essential tools for any business or personal brand looking to establish a presence online.
It’s the foundation + hub of your online presence, where you can:
- take your prospects somewhere you have more control over,
- showcase your brand and services in more detail,
- share your industry knowledge + expertise to build trust,
- grow your email list to nurture + engage with potential clients,
- have a direct line to your audience through your email list.
Social channels are important and have their place in the marketing mix but you need to take your users somewhere – let’s call this DESTINATION WEBSITE ✈️!
Your website is often the first point of contact between you and your clients, and it’s crucial to make a good first impression.
Destination website – soar ahead of the competition, drive traffic to your website and see your business take flight!
The goal of your website
Of course, before jumping the gun and building a website, you need to know whether your business even needs a website in the first place.
To do this you need to consider your business goals and ask yourself what kind of online presence meets your business needs. Then you can start to map out your website and compare platforms so that you can choose the right one.
Destination website – soar ahead of the competition, drive traffic to your website and see your business take flight!
Best website platform: 6 Factors to consider
It goes without saying that you will want a platform that helps you build a website that is professional, user-friendly, and engaging.
The website platform influences your website’s design, functionality, and search engine optimisation (SEO) capabilities.
With different website platforms offering varying degrees of customisation, ease of use and SEO features, it can be hard to know which platform aligns with your goals and stands out from the competition.
Here are six things to consider to maximise the utility of your website:
#1 Ease of use
Is the website platform user-friendly and easy to navigate? Can you quickly create and update your website without technical expertise? Are you comfortable using a website builder, or do you have coding knowledge?
#2 Customisation
Does the website platform offer a wide range of customisable options, such as themes and plugins, to make your website look unique and professional? How much control do you want over your website’s design and functionality?
#3 Budget
What is your budget for building and maintaining your website? Does the website platform fit within your budget? Are there any hidden costs that may cause financial strain in the long run?
#4 Scalability
Can the website platform accommodate your business growth? Is it possible to add more features and functionality to your website as your business expands?
#5 SEO
Does the website platform have built-in SEO tools that make it easy to optimise your content for search engines? Will it help your website rank higher in search engine results?
#6 Customer Support
What kind of customer support does the website platform offer? Is there a responsive and knowledgeable customer support team available to assist you if you run into issues? Can you easily reach out to them for assistance?
Professional website support to keep your website secure and protected.
Website platforms available
In the current market, three of the most accessible and popular website platforms available are Wix, Squarespace and WordPress.
These three platforms present varying degrees of advantages and disadvantages. Below, you’ll see the features of each website platform:
Wix – a user-friendly platform
✅ Wix is a website builder that allows you to create a website without any coding knowledge.
✅ It has a user-friendly interface, drag-and-drop functionality, and a wide range of templates to choose from.
✅ You can easily create a basic website with simple features and functionality.
✅ It is also an all-in-one platform and can handle products and email marketing.
However, Wix has a couple of limitations worth considering:
❌ It doesn’t offer as much control over SEO as other platforms, which can make it difficult to optimise your website for search engines.
❌ It can be limiting if you want to have more control over your website as your business grows.
Wix website platform
Squarespace – a design-oriented platform
✅ Squarespace is another popular website builder that focuses on design and aesthetics.
✅ It offers a range of modern and stylish templates, as well as tools for customising your website’s look and feel.
✅ Like Wix, Squarespace has all-in-one features such as e-commerce, making it a good option for businesses that want to sell products online.
Squarespace also has some limitations worth knowing about:
❌ Limited flexibility – its templates can be restrictive,
❌ It doesn’t provide as much control over SEO as other platforms.
Squarespace website platform
WordPress – a platform with more control
WordPress gives business owners complete control over their website’s design and functionality.
With its selection of plugins, you can modify and customise it to suit any style or needs.
As an open-source platform developers and users can create and modify themes and plugins to add new features and functionality.
✅ WordPress is a powerful and flexible offering full control over your website’s design and functionality.
✅ It’s seen as the best option for being able to optimise pages properly for SEO.
✅ The hosting is separate (not self-hosted) which means that utilities are not shared with other sites.
✅ With WordPress, you have complete control over your website’s content, structure, and design.
✅ You can add custom code, install plugins, and make changes to your website’s files, which gives you the ability to create a truly unique and customised website that stands out from the competition.
❌ It needs someone knowledgeable to help support and maintain the site to keep it secure and protected from hackers.
❌ One of the downsides to WordPress is that there can be a lot of plugins that need updating regularly.
❌ Also more plugins can bloat the site and slow it down and this impacts user experience and SEO.
❌ It takes longer to build and is more costly.
However, using WordPress with a premium page builder such as Divi, more functions reduces the need for as many plugins.
As you can see, Wix and Squarespace offer a very different range of capabilities compared to WordPress.
Wix and Squarespace are easier for those people with not much technical know-how or coding experience.
However, further along the line, WordPress becomes a more powerful platform in terms of customisability, SEO and scalability.
Example website built using WordPress
Is your website like a flat or a detached house?
Consider this analogy:
Wix and Squarespace are like renting a flat in a block
Everyone lives in the same building and you share the communal areas. If the lift breaks down or the corridors get crowded it affects the traffic to your front door.
Living in close proximity to your neighbours may be noisy which would be frustrating.
Whilst, there’s nothing wrong with living in a flat and it’s a great, affordable option and a great starter home, over time you may notice its limitations.
Such as the inability to extend and make structural changes. Painting your outside wall or changing the roof for example.
WordPress is like buying a plot of land and building a house on it.
In this scenario you have full control of the size and structure of the house. You can also extend over time.
It’s a more expensive option and takes longer to create but with more control, you can have exactly what you want.
With WordPress it takes some time to build, you’ll need to invest a certain amount of time and energy and you will need a bit of technical knowledge to build and design the site initially.
But in the end, you’ve got a website that’s truly yours, that you can design and tweak in any way you like and can easily develop and expand as your business grows.
Whereas Wix and Squarespace are simple and easy, you don’t have to worry too much about being a technical wizard. Which is why it makes it a sensible option for new businesses.
The analogy of your website as a house that you own and have full control of versus renting a flat and sharing the facilities.
WHEN YOU OUTGROW YOUR WEBSITE
The problems often encountered with Wix and Squarespace is that while they serve as good starting points for a website novice, they become trickier further along the line.
When someone wants to make changes or fix their website to make it work harder for them, it starts to get too technical.
Also the self-hosting and closed-source factors makes it less flexible.
Scaleability = visibility
Websites should be created with scalability in mind and if you’re producing any kind of content, you need a website platform that would enable top-tier SEO.
Search engine visibility
One of the biggest advantages of using WordPress is it’s designed with SEO in mind and provides businesses with complete control over their website’s visibility in search engines.
Powerful SEO plugins like Yoast SEO customise your website’s meta descriptions, titles and other SEO elements to ensure that your website is easily discoverable by search engines.
And tagging and marking-up your content properly is easier. And this is important for optimisation.
WordPress also has better control over website speed and performance, which is another crucial factor in SEO.
Unlike Wix and Squarespace, WordPress allows you to choose your own hosting provider, giving you more control over your website’s speed and performance.
Blog on understanding the goal of your website.
Taking back control: SEO & websites
When it comes to “fixing” a website, we always start with a website audit and the first point of contact is to get your website’s SEO score.
Web design companies can be a quick and convenient option for businesses that need a website or a website fix, but they may not always be the best choice.
There are several issues that businesses should be aware of before deciding to work with web design companies.
THEY Don’t take the time to understand your business:
One of the primary issues is that web design companies often don’t take the time to understand the business, leaving you to come up with the content without guidance or support.
Bear in mind that not all web designers are marketers. They are excellent at designing and creating websites but may not have the knowledge around messaging and content. And content is the fuel of your website!
This can be a significant challenge for businesses who may not have the expertise or time to create their own content.
Limited SEO expertise:
Some web design companies don’t always have the necessary expertise in SEO. It may seem unbelievable, but many web design companies don’t know how to optimise websites for search engine rankings, which can have a detrimental impact on a business’s online visibility and traffic.
Technical jargon:
Web building and design can be very technical and a lot of web design companies often use jargon that is difficult for businesses to understand.
No ongoing support:
Once the website is built and designed a lot of web design companies don’t offer the ongoing support after the website goes live.
This is challenging for businesses as they might pivot or change services and then need to adapt web pages with no idea how to do this alone.
A successful website needs more than just tech skills – it requires a strategic approach.
Take back control: with confidence
In order to take back control of your own website, consider fully migrating to WordPress and get website support that fully understands the needs and goals of your business and website. Working alongside you with the design always results in a more cohesive website.
Beyond just having good design and a website optimised for SEO, it’s really important that businesses can manage updates on their website once the building process is finished.
I often work with clients where the web designer is the ‘gatekeeper’ and isn’t keen to let businesses make any updates to the website.
This slows down progress but more importantly, the business owner doesn’t get to learn the process for themselves.
To be fair to the web designer, this hesitancy could come from clients messing up their websites.
But with the right training and support, this hurdle could be overcome. And as a minimum, the client should at least be able to add and edit blogs.
It’s important for businesses to have the reins of their website so that they can take back control of their content to be able to create more of the right content for their ideal customer.
Teaching the basic principles of SEO and blog writing, allows businesses to have the confidence to understand the whole process.
And if you feel it is time to move away from your current platform and WordPress is the logical next step, help is at hand. Find out more about our affordable web design services here.
Coach updating their website themselves.
Conclusions & recommendations
When it comes to choosing a website platform for your business content, WordPress is the clear winner.
With its flexibility, customisation options and powerful SEO features, WordPress gives you complete control over your website and helps you optimise it for search engines.
While Wix and Squarespace are user-friendly and design-oriented platforms that are great for novices, they don’t offer the same level of control and SEO capabilities as WordPress.
If you’re looking for a website platform that offers the best balance of design, functionality, and SEO capabilities, WordPress is the platform for you.
Choose WordPress and take control of your online presence.
Learning the process for the backend of your website is vital for your success as it allows you to have the full control you need.
And having a WordPress tech support partner to guide you along the way is also worth considering.